Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector (review)

Scholars of Brazilian literature have long lamented that their greatest writers, like Machado de Assis, Guimarães Rosa, and Clarice Lispector, do not enjoy wider recognition outside of the ken of Luso-Brazilian specialists. Benjamin Moser's excellent new biography of Clarice Lispector, Why This World, takes a big step toward correcting that problem. Scrupulously researched and clearly written, Moser's presentation of Clarice's difficult, often tragic personal life offers new insights into her work and is sure to foment much more interest in Clarice Lispector in the United States and elsewhere in the English-speaking world. And this is a very good thing since Clarice Lispector, the inspiration behind Hélène Cixous's theory of l'écriture féminine and a writer who puts an intensely human face on the sometimes arcane concepts of poststructuralism, possesses one of twentieth-century literature's most unique, most unmistakable voices.

Dividing his 479 page book into a short Introduction and Epilogue, plus forty-five small units, each of which addresses a major event in Clarice's life, Moser begins his story by discussing the salient, and often horrifying, details of Clarice's family life in the western Ukraine and the vicious pogroms it endured there. The remainder of the book is given over to the family's emigration to Northeastern Brazil, Clarice's childhood life, and her subsequent rise to celebrity status. Making painstaking use of letters, assorted documents, and interviews, Moser excels at showing us the relationships and conflicts behind Clarice's complicated, painful personal life and her, again, complicated and painful, evolution into one of modern Brazilian - and Western - literature's most brilliant writers.

Overall, Moser's primary argument is that Clarice's personal life is never far below the surface of her fiction. While the limitations of biographical criticism are well known, Moser makes a convincing case for his position. When read in the light of what was going on in Clarice's life at the time, her probing, quicksilver texts do seem to reward this type of interpretive approach. And yet, one feels, it would be a mistake to read her narratives as mere autobiography, at least as this term is understood in its traditional sense. What comes through most strongly in reading Moser's meticulously researched and clearly written biography is that, for Clarice, even as a young child traumatized by her mother's tragic condition and by her father's struggles against bigotry, language offered her not so much an escape from her troubled world as a way of writing her "self" (and all of a "self's" multiform manifestations, from the sexual to the mystical), a way to create an identity for herself and, by writing, deal with the unhappiness that plagued her.

In developing this line of thought, Moser lays out a spate of subjects, topics, and issues that characterize Clarice's work, from beginning to end, and that tie it together: a powerful sense of guilt; her Jewishness; the ontological problems of love and possession; the influence of not only Dostoevsky and Hesse, which are well known, but also of Katherine Mansfield (somewhat less well known) and, most interestingly, of Spinoza; Clarice's relationships with her sisters and her friends; her complex, sometimes difficult personality; the importance of writing (perhaps best understood, for contemporary readers, via the critical term écriture) to Clarice; animals; motherhood; God; Jewish mysticism; the nexus between "crime" and "creation;" the need to break free of one's solipsism and engage the world; sexuality, sexual expression, and sexual identity; a desire for the "climactic" (320) and the "orgasmic" (333) in all aspects of life; and the creative relationships between music, painting, and writing.

Key texts discussed at some length by Moser include the novels, Near to the Wild Heart, The Apple in the Dark, The Passion According to G. H, The Stream of Life, and The Hour of the Star, plus such canonical stories as "Family Ties," "Love," "The Crime of the Mathematics Professor," and "The...